Visual Studio 2008 for Green Programming?
Many many years ago I bought my first Hayes Smartmodem 300 (that’s 300 baud or bits per second for the youngsters out there, not 300Kbps). Unfortunately, I didn’t have any software to actually use it. So, I spent an evening writing a small terminal emulator in 8080 assembler. I even threw in VT100 emulation and it remained small and compact. A while later I wrote a little 6502 assembler subroutine for the good old Apple II that needed to fit in the little 300 bytes (a bit larger than two fully expanded twitter messages for the youngsters) of space that Apple left for such things. This sort of activity was not at all unusual in the early 1980s and many of us used to think a lot about code cycles: Literally how many CPU ticks were needed to do something. So, in a day and age when packages are usually measured in megabytes and even gigabytes, I was surprised and amused to read this entry in Dave Ohara’s Green Data Center Blog…
Visual Studio 2008’s saves energy with Application Performance Profiling
I’ve been wondering if I should return to my programming roots (at least philosophically… I’m not planning to write in Assembler again) in terms of coding for efficient CPU usage. It seems like I’m not the only one thinking about this. A welcome side effect of all this is that efficient green software should also be faster (fewer CPU cycles) that bloatware. Fingers crossed that others take notice.